Taliban Abuses Cannot Continue Unchecked

Leaders worldwide have congratulated President-elect Trump on his recent win in the U.S. presidential election. From Ukraine to France to Brazil to China, heads of state of diverse countries have publicly voiced their respect for the outcome of the election. These are to be expected. But the Taliban—Afghanistan’s ultra-conservative terrorist group that gained control of the country in 2021—has also made known its support for the result. Taliban leader Inamullah Samangani posted on X, “Americans are not ready to hand over the leadership of their great country to a woman.” 

This congratulatory message was chilling for me as an Afghan refugee living in the United States. The plain truth is that the Taliban hate women. And they definitely hate women with power. The Taliban are not only denying women power, they are denying Afghan women their very basic human rights. We cannot let the Taliban get away with eliminating women from Afghan society. The United States and the international community need to do more and do it now.

[The Taliban] banned girls from attending school and crushed my dreams. That was 1996…Now I am 37.

As a young girl in Afghanistan, I dreamt of becoming a lawyer. Every day, I would walk past the Supreme Court close to my parents’ house in Kabul, Afghanistan. I imagined myself in a black gown, standing up for the human rights of clients who had been wronged. That dream vanished overnight when the Taliban took power in 1996. They banned girls from attending school and crushed my dreams. That was 1996, when I was nine years old. Now I am 37, and the same thing is happening.

In the three years since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, they have systematically erased women and girls from public life, enforcing decrees that eliminate their right to study, work, move, speak, or freely associate. The Taliban have arbitrarily arrested, detained, tortured, and even killed women who protest these Taliban edicts, violate hijab rules, or travel without a male guardian. These profound changes have sparked a severe mental health crisis among Afghan women, with an increase of forced marriage, domestic violence, depression, and suicide.

I, too, remember the psychological toll this oppression took on my family and me. When I was young, I went to a nearby market with my older sister. My sister was fully covered in a “burqa.” I wore a long black scarf. I was eleven, and there was no burqa in my size. When we arrived, I noticed a government vehicle from the Ministry of Vice and Virtue parked outside. Five Taliban men sat in the back. They drove toward me and my sister, used their loudspeaker, and shouted at me to “Stop!”  One of them came after me with a whip. He chased me, but I ran and reached home safely. I couldn’t sleep for a week. Those feelings have stayed with me. Indeed, I ran as fast as I could because I knew what happens when people are arrested and detained in Afghanistan under the Taliban. A few weeks earlier, the Taliban arrested my brother for having a “Western” haircut and being without a beard. In detention, they tortured and abused him. 

The denial of women’s rights and the mistreatment of detainees in Afghanistan must be met with unified pressure.

The Ministry of Vice and Virtue is back, and they are back to their old ways of terrorizing people, especially women and ethnic minorities. Even those who reach Western countries like the United States cannot escape the Taliban’s reach. When photos of Afghan women living abroad not wearing their hijabs emerge, or the press quote Afghan women, the Taliban punish the women’s relatives still in Afghanistan. 

In September 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report detailing the worsening human rights situation in Afghanistan. UN agencies and international organizations have written excellent reports detailing Taliban repression of women. But we need more than reports. The denial of women’s rights and the mistreatment of detainees in Afghanistan must be met with unified pressure—through sanctions, international investigations, and diplomatic interventions. Civil society, NGOs, and human rights organizations should raise their voices in solidarity, amplifying the stories of those suffering in silence behind prison walls. The use of detention and torture as tools of control reflects the Taliban’s larger strategy to oppress women, not just through restrictions on education and work but by stripping them of their dignity through arrest and direct violence.

Importantly, the incoming U.S. administration must reject the Taliban’s flattery. 

Taliban abuses cannot continue unchecked. We must continue to use diplomatic pressure, humanitarian aid, asylum pathways, and sustained advocacy to ensure that Afghan women are not forgotten. Immediate action is required to stop the complete disappearance of women under Taliban rule. Their fight for dignity, education, and freedom is our fight, too.

Masooda Qazi is a fellow at Refugees International and a refugee from Afghanistan living in California.